I didn't like the "Run Application" thingy in Gnome 2.4, cause every time I type the first letter of a command, it hang for 10-15 seconds (probably looking for possible completions), and since my terminal starts faster, I use the terminal.
But, hey, there's Gnome 2.6 now, why not try that?

One hell of an emerge later, Gnome 2.6 is compiled and installed. I need to restart GDM to get the greeter working again, but that's not too bad, I suppose ...

Yes, there's my good old greeter again, I login, and notice that all my icons on the desktop have become "white papers". Who cares, it's covered by some applications most of the time.

Then I meet "spatial navigation". *Grrr*. I try to find some option to get my navigation toolbar back, but in the end, I google and find that I have to use some regedit-like program to change this default behaviour. Afterwards I need to restart gnome to make the changes happen? Wow, Déjà-vu, that really reminds me of the Windows time.

And it doesn't get better: this time, the gdm greeter seems to have changed to another theme (for what reason???). When I login I receive the message that my .Xmodmap file will be ignored, I have to use the "Keyboard Shortcuts" utility to set my shortcuts. Reluctantly, I try to make the same changes with that program, but it isn't able to replace my .Xmodmap file. Luckily I could still make xmodmap run a the start of each session (Desktop Preferences->Advanced->Sessions-->Startup programs).

Why did I upgrade to Gnome 2.6? Oh yes: the "Run Application". Nope, nothing changed, still, after the first character, it waits for 10 seconds.

I stare at the desktop, and find a new Icon "Computer". Flashback, the ugly green screen with "my computer", they really want to make it look like windows?? Right-click, ... why is the "Delete" option disabled? Why can't I just remove this stupid Icon from my desktop??

If I ever find out how to get the fonts right in fluxbox, I'll leave gnome that very second. I liked this "unix desktop" the way it was, now they're turning it into some Windows-like thing, with unnecessary icons you can't remove, some "configuration editor" that want's to replace the good old text configuration files, and still no possibility to shutdown the pc directly from the "Actions" menu.

First, I'll start with a description of the situation, so you could understand my needs, then I'll describe how I installed and configured wu-imapd-ssl on a Debian box.

My ISP (Scarlet) is sometimes kind of lazy, one of the things they refuse to do is enable clients to use secure authentication of ssl encryption for checking their POP3 mailbox. (Nope, they don't even provide Imap). So my password can be sniffed by anyone between me and my provider. Unfortunately, that password is also used to establish the ADSL connection, change my billing information, or just receive my private data. It can be used to change my homepage, in short, who has that password, becomes as powerfull as I am over my internet account. And Scarlet also doesn't provide spam-filtering/marking.

Nowadays I'm most of the time connected to the internet through the University network (kotnet) from the KULeuven. It shouldn't surprise you that I don't like to send my all-mighty password from this network, to my ISP, just cleartext, each five minutes, proceeded by the magical keyword "PASS". Because of this, and because I wanted to use SpamAssassin to filter my mail, I decided to use Fetchmail, Exim and SpamAssassin to fetch and filter mail from my provider. I'm running this only on my pc connected to my provider, cause I believe the connection doesn't leave the "trusted" network of my provider. And for more than a year, I've been checking my email with Mutt, through an ssh session.
At the university however, they do use IMAP, and you are obligated to use ssl encryption. And I've been always been using Mozilla to send and receive mail for that account.
But now, it's becomming an annoyance that to check both email accounts I needed to start Mozilla, and start an ssh session to my home pc. I don't really know if Mutt supports local mboxes and external Imap, but Mozilla supports multiple IMAP boxes anyway. So I wanted to set up an IMAP server on my home Pc...

Before beginning to install wu-imapd(-ssl), I already had fetchmail, exim and spamassassin fetching and filtering my mail.

apt-get install wu-imapd-ssl

Don't we all just LOVE apt? First I looked for something like /etc/init.d/imapd, but found nothing, so I tried

/etc/init.d/inetd restart

and

netstat -t -l -n

and yes, something was listening to port 993, and that would probably be an IMAP server. Now make sure you can connect from the Internet to that port.

iptables -I no-conns-from-ppp0 -p tcp --dport 993 -j ACCEPT

and in the file /etc/hosts.allow I added and extra line:

imapd: ALL

Let's start testing. I configured an extra mail account, pointing the hostname to my box running at home, username and same as my regular Unix u/p. Bingo, had to accept my certificate first, and then I saw an Inbox (which contained mail from the /var/spool/myusername mbox), and a Trash directory. I created some new folders in mozilla, copied some mail in them, and yes, it worked. Wow, that was easy, I didn't need to configure anything from imapd.

But, beside my /var/spool/tom mbox, I also have some other mboxes, containing sent mail, my "historical inbox", which contains all mail I received the past 3 years, and it would also be good if I could see my junk folders (spam, evil, and executables, which hold my mail filtered by spamassassin, own rules, or filtered because they contained win32 executables). Ok, where's the documentation of wu-imapd? man imapd, not really helpful, the faq on the site of wu-imapd refers to a file named CONFIG, but I couldn't find it anyware, probably because it was renamed in the debian package. So I tried some trial-and-error. I created a new folder (in Mozilla) with some odd name. I looked in my home dir, and idd, a new mbox with that name was created. Then, using some common sense, I started to look for files named like .mail*, .imap* in my homedir. In ".mailboxlist" I found that weird name again. Bingo! I added my other mboxes, and yes, mozilla displayed them, and I could find all my mail.

I also found out that the documentation for imapd, and c-client - which appears to be important to imapd too - are in /usr/share/doc/libc-client2002edebian and /usr/share/doc/uw-imapd
It might seem strange, but in those documents, they never mention .mailboxlist. But there seem to be other configuration files. In /etc/c-client.cf I put:

I accept the risk
set mail-subdirectory Mail

Now you might wonder what that first line does, well you should read /usr/share/doc/libc-client2002edebian/imaprc.txt.gz (with zless for instance).
After adjusting the subdir, I needed to update .mailboxlist, because it works relative to the mail-subdirectory. But everything seems to work fine now, and again, I'm a happy man.

Conclusion:

• Installation is easy
• Documentation could be better
• It does what's it's supposed to do

Neduz

As you could read in my previous there are still some aspects about Linux I don't understand (I wrote about fonts and mentioned printing). But if there's another thing it's sound. Basically it's easy. OSS or Alsa provides drivers, both make an /dev/dsp or /dev/sound/dsp device, and most software uses those devices to play or capture sound.

Alsa, the "new" system actually wants to get rid of that /dev/dsp stuff, and they're probably right. Xmms and mplayer support it for a long time. And if you don't want load snd-pcm-oss modules, you can use aoss to make old program's think they're using an oss device, while in fact they're using alsa.

But with cheap on-board sound cards problems raise fairly quickly: since they have only one hardware channel or something like that, ther're not able to play sound from different program's at the same time. KDE came up with arts, Enlightment with Esound. Both work by the same idea: a server process (arstd or esd) mixes different sources to one output for the pcm device. Sound-producing apps can either use an esound or arts library (mplayer and xmms do), or you can emulate a dsp device by using artsdsp or esddsp. Or, if you use Alsa, you can use a configuration using dmix.

The problem with using arts or esd is that they use buffers, that can be quite large. Analysers in xmms are not synchronised with the sound you hear. Luckily mplayer allows you to set a audio/video delay, but when trying to play a game like Unreal it really becomes a problem. You can minimize the buffer of arts, but then the game begins to react slower.

Esd also has some weird effects. eg: when I pause a song in xmms (using esd output), all other software using esd "hangs". Even mozilla can completely be "paused" using the xmms pause button. When you click play again, all paused programs resume work again. Weird.

Jackit is one of the latest software mixing solutions. It should have a low latency, but I ran into some trouble after installing it: you seem to be obligated to run the jackd daemon as the same user you want to run you audio client. The latency indeed was ok, but as soon as some program started using the cpu, there were glitches in the music. That problem could be resolved with some realtime patches to the kernel, but I didn't bother going through that yet. And AFAIK, jack isn't able to emulate oss devices.

Now my real big frustration: trying to use TeamSpeak and Unreal at the same time. Teamspeak needs playback and capturing sound. If you only run Teamspeak, there's "no problem", it just locks your dsp device and works. But with /dev/dsp locked, no other program is able to play sound. The Unreal version I try to use with Teamspeak does work with artsdsp, but Teamspeak doesn't.

The right solution? That's probably something with alsa dmix and dsnoop. Some sites suggest disabling capturing for some programs, but TeamSpeak seems to lock the dsp device to hard to share it with any other process.
I'll let you know if I find some solution.

Recently I read about the fact that Gnome and KDE are getting heavier. Indeed, it took about 10 seconds after login before everything was started on my notebook. In fact only 2 things are causing most of that waiting: kdeinit for running kopete (which I stopped using by now), and nautilus (which i use only once a week, but is started every time I log in). Time for something else.

emerge fluxbox
After entering username and password in gdm, fluxbox was started in no time. Which was nice. Unfortunately the menu doesn't contain all program's I've got installed. Not a big problem, cause I start most programs from a terminal anyway, but even the multi-gnome-terminal wasn't listed, and that happens to be my favorite.

Another problem: Fonts. One of those things that makes me wonder why I'm not using Windows are fonts. Allthough 'linux' supports most of them, it sometimes seems so hard convincing every program to actually use them. For some reason Mozilla's font was smaller, and more ugly in fluxbox than it is in Gnome. Why oh why? If there's one thing more even more complicated than linux printing, it must be fonts. I don't know how Windows, or Mac handle it, but in linux it's a maze. There are things like a font server, that must be configured in your X server, for every kind of font you need to have something installed that can use them. In any directories containing fonts you should first run "mkfontdir" or something similar. Then there's something like fontcache, who knows what it's good for, but it resolved some problem I had recently. And then there are configuration files for Gtk, kde (or in fact qt), the fontserver, fontcache, ... When you take a look at the available fonts in OO.o, the Gimp and mozilla, they're different, why?

Panels. Sometimes it are those small things that make you like your desktop configuration. eg. that little speaker on top of my gnome desktop, you place you cursor one it, and just scrolling changes the volume. Hah, isn't that wonderfull? No clicking, just scrolling :)
Also the clock with the calender if you click on it. It's just so usefull, and I missed when I saw fluxbox.

My conclusion: I'm still using gnome, and maybe I should find a way to stop gnome from from starting nautilus.